THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
Hell Yes They Knew:
2006
There is a large time gap between this entry and the resumption of information in these pages. See my Update Information page for an explanation of why this and other pages containing information spanning September 2004 to September 2006 are not yet complete.
- September 26: Then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice gave the final approval for the EPA to issue press releases in the days following 9/11 that claimed the air around Ground Zero was "safe to breathe." As head of the National Security Council, she was "the final decision maker" on EPA statements about lower Manhattan air quality, according to internal documents. Scientists and lawmakers have since deemed the air rife with toxins that have caused death and chronic illnesses among hundreds, if not thousands, of first-responders and citizens. Early tests known to the EPA at the time had already found high asbestos levels, but those results were omitted from the press releases because of "competing priorities" such as national security and "opening Wall Street," according to a report by the EPA's inspector general. The chief of staff for then-EPA head Christie Todd Whitman, Eileen McGinnis, told the inspector general of heated discussions, including "screaming telephone calls," about what to put in the press releases. The notes come from a 2003 probe into public assurances made on September 16, five days after the 9/11 attacks. They tell how a White House staffer "worked with Dr. Condoleezza Rice's press secretary" on reviewing the press releases for weeks. Now-retired Inspector General Nikki Tinsley says her auditors tried to question the head of Bush's Environmental Quality Council, but "he would not talk to us." Interestingly, the New York Post scrubbed this article from their Web site within 48 hours of its appearance. (New York Post/Infowars)
- September 30: A letter from a former sergeant at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, the home of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), on active duty on 9/11, raises questions about the official story of the attacks. (Note: While the identity of the author, Lauro Chavez, is claimed by the author of the OpEd News editorial which reprints the letter, originally written for the Cincinnati Post, as always, the editor of this site claims no knowledge of the veracity of the claims set forth. The opinions of the author are interesting, perhaps even compelling, and his identity as (apparently) a former Air Force sergeant with Top Secret clearance bolsters the claims laid forth, but the reader must judge for him- or herself.)
- Chavez makes several interesting claims about the events that occurred before and during the attacks. He begins by claiming that "In the days prior to the tragedies, we were involved in many exercises. Some of these exercises included the scenarios of hijacked planes crashing into, our building the world trade center, the White House, Sears Tower, and the Pentagon. These drills or exercises as we called them, where classified Top Secret. Having a Top Secret rated clearance I was dumbfounded that they would ever push a training exercise above the level of Secret. Over my 8 years in the Army, I had participated in many exercises around the world, none of which were ever classified over the Secret level." Chavez, as were many of his peers, was also stunned to note that months before, Bush announced that Dick Cheney would head operations for NORAD. NORAD had always, up to that point, been commanded by a military officer.
- On the morning of 9/11, Chavez's command was busy with a training exercise, being instructed to prepare for a mock deployment to the Middle East. Chavez had been prepped and ready since 4 am; he noticed that soldiers were setting up barriers around the command post and placing guns and shoulder-fired rocket emplacements on the roof. He was told that the emplacements were precautions for planes attempting to crash into the building. Chavez and other soldiers were in a secure area of monitoring the "fly patterns of all the planes on the aerospace grid," commercial as well as military and fake enemy planes sent up as part of the day's exercise. Many Air Force fighters were already scrambled, mostly from Andrews Air Force Base, the central hub of the East Coast defense grid. They were scattered around the country, leaving very few planes available to defend Washington. Chavez says he and his colleagues watched in disbelief as the first plane hit the World Trade Center, and almost immediately began asking, "what are the odds this could happen for real, during a training exercise that's covering the same scenario?" Then, inexplicably, Chavez says Cheney ordered NORAD to stand down jets scrambled to intercept. The second plane hit minutes later; only after the third plane had struck the Pentagon did Cheney order jets scrambled to intercept the fourth plane, apparently en route to strike the White House.
- Chavez asks, "There were just too many questions that no one could answer, too many things that did not make sense. How is it possible to have a training exercise about planes hitting the WTC and then actually have planes hit the WTC? This kind of thing just does not happen unless its pre-planned. What reason would there be to have this type of exercise on that morning[?] I'll tell you if you are placing fake planes all over the North American aerospace grid then you have no way of knowing which planes are real and which are fake. Then to thicken the plot you put a civilian in charge of NORAD so that the military does not have the power to initiate the order for jets to be scrambled to intercept. If the military would have still commanded power over NORAD they would have scrambled jets because they would have simply followed the procedures that had been in place for this type of situation for years and years and scrambled jets.
- Chavez says that one of his colleagues at MacDill, a former commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, standing alongside him watching the towers burn, was stunned by the quick collapse of the towers. The engineer said that, to his knowledge, such constructions just don't collapse that way. "Even if they are struck by objects; he went on to say that in theory if the top 10 floors were hit, then possibly just that part of the building would fall over and off, but the rest would remain standing. When I asked him, not understanding the implications of demolitions, he told me that it looked as if they were brought down by controlled demolitions." Chavez claims that the collapse of Building 7, one of the buildings adjacent to the Twin Towers, was a dead giveaway. "Building 7 was never directly hit by a plane. Now it was stated that a piece of one of the towers fell onto the side of building 7 and caught one of the floors on fire. A few moments later we all witnessed the most perfect example of controlled demolitions to ever be caught on camera. It could not be proved that building 7 fell due to fire. My friend and I standing there in the [command center] watching in uninterruptible awe with all those other military members; watching building 7 fall perfectly onto its footprint; my friend stating that it was beautifully done."
- Chavez claims that a friend of his at the Pentagon claimed that whatever hit the Pentagon, it wasn't a plane; according to Chavez, his friend refused to discuss the matter in any depth, and was shipped overseas, presumably for the Afghan offensive, weeks later.
- Like others, Chavez believes that the operation was too sophisticated and complex to have been engineered by al-Qaeda terrorists. Whether the reader chooses to believe Chavez, or dismisses his letter as an amalgam of several of the more popular conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, is not for the editor of this site to say. (Cincinnati Post/OpEd News)
- October 2: 9/11 commission members are alarmed and angry that they were never told about the July 10, 2001 White House meeting when then-CIA director George Tenet attempted to warn then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice about an imminent al-Qaeda attack, a warning that Rice brushed off. The meeting was first made public in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial. The final report from the commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Tenet and Rice, now secretary of state. Rice and other White House officials initially denied that any such meeting took place, but after documentation proved that the meeting indeed did occur, the White House is now saying that Woodward mischaracterized the nature and content of the meeting. "It really didn't match Secretary Rice's recollection of the meeting at all," says Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush. "It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don't believe that's an accurate account." Most experts believe that Tenet was the source of Woodward's account of the meeting. The book says that both Tenet and Cofer Black, Tenet's counterterrorism chief, left the meeting frustrated by Rice's refusal to take the warnings seriously. Black is quoted as saying, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Neither Black nor Tenet have commented on the report.
- According to Woodward, Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting -- calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House -- because he wanted to "shake Rice" into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Woodward writes that Tenet left the meeting frustrated because "they were not getting through to Rice."
- Some 9/11 panel members are asking whether information about the meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. Tenet, Rice, and Black all testified at length before the commission, and were asked specifically to detail how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001. "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this," said Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission. "I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious." Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, sayssaid that the staff of the commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Woodward's book and agreed that the meeting "was never mentioned to us. ...This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about." He says he attended the commission's private interviews with both Tenet and Rice and had pressed "very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch" about terrorist threats before the 9/11 attacks. Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 commission and now a top aide to Rice at the State Department, agrees that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Woodward's book. "If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing," he says. "Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings." (New York Times)
- October 2: In a related item to the one immediately above, the State Department reveals that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashchroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda attack that was given to Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley on July 10. Rumsfeld and Ashcroft received their briefing about a week after Rice's. One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaeda, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again. Apparently Tenet gave the 9/11 commission the same briefing on January 28, 2004, but did not mention that he had given the briefing to Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft. The briefing's information was not contained in the commission's final report. Rice initially tells reporters that she has no memory of what she calls "the supposed meeting," adding, "What I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack and I refused to respond." Ashcroft, who resigned as attorney general on November 9, 2004, says he never received the briefing as well. But later today, Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, issues a statement confirming that she indeed received the briefing and recommended that it be given to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. McCormack attempts to spin the briefing as "old news:" "The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks. After this meeting, Dr. Rice asked that this same information be briefed to Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General Ashcroft. That briefing took place by July 17."
- The Pentagon refuses to confirm or deny that Rumsfeld ever received the briefing; Ashcroft's former chief of staff David Ayres says that Ashcroft still can't remember being briefed by Tenet and Black, though he does remember a July 5 briefing on threats to US interests abroad. The briefing "didn't say within the United States," said one former senior intelligence official. "It said on the United States, which could mean a ship, an embassy or inside the United States." 9/11 commission report author Philip Zelikow refuses to comment on why he left the information out of the commission's final report. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste says the commission was never told that Rice had brushed off the warning. According to Tenet, he says, Rice "understood the level of urgency he was communicating." (McClatchy News)
- October 5: Four widows who lost their husbands during the 9/11 attacks, Lorie Van Auken, Patty Cazaza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Monica Gabrielle, are demanding an explanation from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the July 10, 2001 meeting between herself, George Tenet, and Cofer Black that gave Rice a stark warning about an imminent terrorist attack. According to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial, Rice ignored the warning. The four list a compilation of pre-9/11 warnings that they feel shows the negligence of the Bush administration before the attacks, and ask not only why Rice, then the national security advisor, ignored the warning, but when given his own briefing, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft immediately cancelled his plans to fly on commercial airliners and instead did his flying on private, chartered jets. (Raw Story)
- October 6: In his new memoir, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice, former Attorney General John Ashcroft becomes the only Cabinet-level Bush official to attack the 9/11 Commission. Ashcroft writes that the commission "seemed obsessed with trying to lay the blame for the terrorist attacks at the feet of the Bush administration, while virtually absolving the previous administration of responsibility." He also writes that the commission's hearings "were not so much about discovering the truth as they were about assessing blame and grandstanding," and says that the hearings "degenerated into show trials." Ashcroft is well-remembered for repeatedly lying to the commission and treating the commission members with belligerence and contempt. Republican commissioner Slade Gorton, a former senator, says that Ashcroft's charges are "extraordinary." Gorton, recalling that Bush had personally repudiated Ashcroft's tactics in his sparring with the commission, says, "Most of the criticism (the commission received) was the exact opposite: that we didn't blame anyone. Our job was to write a factual account which readers could use to assess blame for themselves." According to Gorton, Ashcroft "may very well have been the worst witness we interviewed," and calls him "very unresponsive and unhelpful." Gorton says he "was particularly disappointed, because I liked him when we were in the Senate together."
- Ashcroft accuses the commission of trying to "stimulate media interest" in their hearings by leaking "juicy tidbits" beforehand, a charge with virtually no evidence. Ashcroft writes that this was why he, alone of all the serving and former senior officials who were witnesses for the commission, did not provide them with advance copies of his testimony. Gorton dismisses that explanation, saying "The reason, I`m convinced, is that he intended to -- and did -- use his testimony to launch a disingenuous and underhanded personal attack on a member of the commission." Gorton is referring to Ashcroft's scurrilous attack on Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick. At his April 14, 2003, appearance Ashcroft sprung on the commission a just-declassified top secret memo written by Gorelick, a former Clinton administration Justice Department official. The memo, Ashcroft charged, was "the basic architecture" for what he calls a procedural "wall" that was, Ashcroft said, "the greatest structural cause for Sept. 11." The wall -- in effect a hodge-podge of laws, court rulings and departmental regulations that had accreted over time -- had strictly separated intelligence from criminal investigations out of concern that prosecutors should not be allowed to use the much less restrictive rules about wiretapping and other kinds of surveillance that applied in intelligence operations to gather material for criminal cases, effectively end-running the Fourth Amendment.
- The commission's report, however, concluded that the wall grew up during the 1980s, primarily as a response to a series of court rulings, and noted that a memo from Ashcroft's deputy Larry Thompson in August 2001 had effectively ratified the policy laid out by Gorelick in 1995. On the day prior to Ashcroft's testimony, acting FBI director Thomas Pickard told the commission that Ashcroft had told him during a briefing covering counter-terrorism that "he did not want to hear about this anymore," and had refused a request for additional funding for FBI counter-terrorist activities. Gorton believes that these facts account for Ashcroft`s behavior. "He did have that (the Pickard allegations) and the Larry Thompson memo," he says. "He had a great deal to answer for." Chairman Thomas Kean and his deputy, Lee Hamilton, have written that Ashcroft's testimony represented "the most aggressive challenge to the commission's credibility," and noted that it set off a "steady drumbeat of criticism," including calls from senior House Republican leaders for Gorelick's resignation, and left them with "a huge political problem." Ashcroft broke his own department's rules, and possibly the law, when, two weeks later, he personally declassified more memos written by Gorelick and had them posted on the Justice Department's Web site, even though they had not previously been made available to the commission. Gorton calls that decision "unprincipled" and recalls that when commissioners met the following day with Bush, "he personally told Gorelick he did not agree" with the decision to post the memos. (UPI/Monsters and Critics)
- December 25: Alarming allegations by former Republican house member Curt Weldon, that a team of military analysts codenamed "Able Danger" identified Mohamed Atta and other hijackers before the 9/11attacks, has been found to be baseless by a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. The conclusion contradicts assertions by Weldon and a few military officers that US national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks. Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the military analysts' effort, known as "Able Danger," produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, New York. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security advisor. But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded. "Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee reports, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee but just now revealed to the press. Weldon was defeated on November 7 by Democratic challenger Joe Sestak, and is the target of an unrelated Justice Department corruption probe.
- The Senate panel began investigating Able Danger in August 2005, after Weldon and people close to the program went public with their claims. At the time, Weldon was the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. The recently completed probe also dismissed other assertions that have fueled conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks. The panel says it found "no evidence" to support claims by military officers connected to Able Danger that Defense Department lawyers prevented the team's analysts from sharing their findings with FBI counter-terrorism officials before the attacks. Nor was the alleged chart or any information developed by Able Danger improperly destroyed at the direction of Pentagon lawyers, the panel concluded, a charge that had stoked claims of a cover-up. Able Danger was the unclassified name given to a program launched in 1999 by the US Special Operations Command as part of an effort to develop military plans targeting the leadership ranks of al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks. Military analysts assigned to the effort did create charts with pictures of al-Qaeda operatives whose identities were known publicly at the time, including two of the 9/11 hijackers, but the committee concluded that none of those charts depicted Atta. The report generously concludes that Weldon and the others may have been confused.
- In June 2005, Weldon generated controversy when he declared in a speech on the House floor and in a book released that month that he had met with Hadley at the White House shortly after the attacks and had given the national security official a copy of a chart showing that Atta had been identified by Able Danger. But the committee concluded that the chart "was not a pre-9/11 chart" and that "at no time did Mr. Hadley ever see a chart with pre-9/11 data bearing Atta's picture or name as described by Congressman Weldon." The Senate Intelligence Committee notes in its report that its findings were consistent with those of a similar investigation of Able Danger by the Defense Department inspector general's office, released in September.
- Weldon has relished the role of calling attention to national security threats he believes are being ignored by others in government. At times he has carried around a replica of a suitcase-size nuclear bomb to highlight terrorist nuclear dangers. He has also accused Iran of hiding al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, a claim that is disputed by just about everyone with any knowledge of events in the Middle East. (Los Angeles Times)
